Adam Guzman: Thesis Blog

Nosaj Thing Visual Show Debut at Pop Montreal

We arrived in Montreal Wednesday evening, picked up by a Towncar with Fourtet playing through the stereo. I was thrilled to be in a different country. I was even more excited to be performing the visual show. Up until then, we had only performed it live twice, once in Los Angeles, and once in San Francisco. Red Bull did it right. Their setup had two Hummer sized projectors and a custom built screen that reached from behind the performer and over the audience.

The day of the performance was Thursday. By sound check, Julia and I still had a handful of revisions and new clips to generate. We returned to the hotel after Jason tested his sound, and proceeded to work up until we had to perform. As with any project, there is always room for improvement. The more experience we get, the more we learn. We learn about our process, our practice, and our methodologies.  I don’t want to ever stop learning.

Photos By David Lang

After completing the Nosaj Thing live show, I wanted to further investigate the possibilities of a live performance. As it stands, the musical content is created first, and graphics are created to accompany the music. During my meeting with Ben Hooker, I briefly talked about the idea of the recursive musical/visual performance. My question was how can I use visuals to create music and how can my music create visuals? The answer was to use a recursive algorithm to generating sound and graphics exponentially. If I just hit one note, the computer should take over and generate content until I choose to stop or play a different note. A chordal progression should yield a corresponding visual sequence. One method could be to use the Fibonacci Sequence or the Sierpinski Triangle (pictured above). I will have experiments done in the next couple weeks using this method.

I have uploaded the clips used in the live show for Nosaj Thing. These are the formatted for mixing in Modul8. Each clip belongs to a certain part of a song. We triggered and manipulated each clip live with 2 midi controllers. Our performance is focused around disorientation and using the projector as a light source. The first half of the show is dedicated to slowly building a visual style. The images are black and white lines and squares. The positive/negative space is used to create rhythm that is synced with the audio. As the set progresses, the imagery becomes less abstract and focused less on light. Patterns begin to form and space begins to open as if the two dimenions exploded into a third. The relationship the graphics create with the performer is interesting. As the graphics become more spatial, the performer flattens, becoming a 2-D cutout version of himself. This effect is unexpected, but pleasantly welcome.

Last night Julia and I had our first live performance mixing visuals. We performed alongside Jason at Low End Theory in Los Angeles. The capacity at Low End is around 175. There were well over 600 people present. Insane! For that reason, the fire marshall shut us down twice. We got through the first 3 songs of the set on the outside stage. Julia and I controlled the graphics from a raised booth behind the crowd. In the middle of Fuk/Busta the power was shut off. We relocated to the upstairs stage inside, and frantically gathered our setup to continue the show with visuals. We set up a makeshift station to the side of the stage and picked up where we left off. The graphics had a very different feel indoors. In a way, having to relocate the performance was good for us. We got to see our work in two different settings. This will help us with future performances.

Clips can be see here .